The Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón has taken a turn as a director but he crams
in so much excrescent detail that the opera’s basic power is obscured.
Rating: * * *

The turbulent career of the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón has taken yet another turn. Ever since laryngeal and personal problems threw him off the mark, it’s been clear that he wouldn’t, couldn’t (or didn’t want to) sustain a high-pressure schedule as a year-round operatic superstar in the Domingo mould.

So to fill the gaps and give therapeutic rein to the extrovert side of his personality, he’s been branching out by (among other things) singing Mexican pop songs and appearing on moronic telly shows.

But Villazón has more serious artistic aspirations, too, and he has now tried his hand at directing, choosing for his first stab an opera in which he is slated to sing the title-role at Covent Garden in May: Massenet’s Werther.

Many singers in crisis – Callas and Pavarotti among them – have trod this path, few with any success. As an avid reader of great intelligence, Villazón has a head start, and he doesn’t lack ideas or flair.

His big concept relates to another of his extra-musical activities — charitable red-nosing in children’s hospitals. So here he sends in the clowns, turning minor characters into an irritating circus chorus which plays out the action in mime. Add to this some clunking symbolism – Charlotte trapped in a birdcage, Werther shadowed by a small boy representing his inner child – and the result is one of those stagings that doesn’t see the wood for the trees.

Visually, it’s perfectly hideous: white trees with plastic leaves, white ruched curtains and white furniture clash aggressively with the music’s rich chromaticism. But Villazón’s fundamental miscalculation is cramming in so much excrescent detail that the opera’s basic power as a realistic romantic-melodrama on the theme of The Love That Can Never Be is negated and obscured.

More’s the pity, because much work and thought has clearly gone into the staging, and its musical quality is high. Leopold Hager conducts a warm but never over-heated account of the smouldering score, and there’s a committed cast of considerable accomplishment.

Artuo Chacón-Cruz’s Werther has youth and charm on his side, and he sings with bags of glowing passion if not ideal elegance. His Charlotte, the vocally assured Karine Deshayes, is equally caught up in the maelstrom. Anne-Catherine Gillet’s Sophie is pure delight and Lionel Lhote makes a sympathetic Albert.

But the production doesn’t serve them well: I doubt directing will be Villazón’s future any more than it was Callas’s.